A loner with panache and presence

This is the first book about the Scottish artist William Gear (1915-97), an abstract painter of international standing with an emphatic style and bold sense of colour. The son of a miner, Gear was born in Fife and studied painting at the liberal and francophile Edinburgh College of Art. From the start he was marked out as a man of panache and presence, of inner certainty. The art he was making (after a brief Surrealist phase in the Thirties) was abstract and experimental, and looked to Europe rather than London. He was a good organiser and even managed to continue painting and exhibiting his work during the war though he fought in the army abroad. (He had wartime shows in Siena and Florence, and in Hamburg in 1947.) His work derived from the natural world, making reference to slides of body tissue seen when sharing lodgings with medical students, worn painted steps, light coming through trees, and the pithead winding-gear he would have known from his father’s livelihood.